Stirr Mixer 1.8

I dropped by tonight’s Stirr Mixer at Illusions on 260 California Ave in Palo Alto. It’s a better venue for parking and it’s not as loud as the Blue Chalk—-if it’s too loud you are too old? I am certainly at risk for this in the Stirr crowd.

Jim Rowson, who I last saw at Redwood Design Automation before it was absorbed by Cadence in 1994, is now helming tracking shot, a very interesting site devote to helping you assemble slide shows and put them to music. My only quibbles were that it should not require local storage of the pictures (e.g leverage Flickr and/or Photobucket) and there should be an easy way to provide a voice over narration.

I had a chance to meet Jeffrey McManus after seeing him demo Approver at Office2.0; alas I confused him with another Web 2.0 startup that had written on the SVASE mojo wire that they were looking for funding so we talked about that instead of how to focus Approver more sharply at a niche. My bad.

Some follow-up back and forth with Jim Rowson over e-mail

Voice over narration is on our list of stuff to do at some juncture. However, we’re thinking at the start that simple, automatic, decent videos from photos and music has a broader appeal. Doing voice overs requires a fair bit of expertise (microphone, etc.).

My thought was that it would allow Tracking Shot to do more “business oriented” stuff because messaging could be added via voice. Folks could also add background narration snippets around a photo, group of photos, or sequence of photos. But I do agree on the recording quality, although with all of the audioblogging going on they might be able to leverage another service and just mix them in.